I woke this morning unable to see
over the horizon, the curvature of
the Earth holding me hostage to this
hour, this front porch, so I watched
a sparrow bathe in a teaspoon of
rainwater and thought about nothing
at all, easy enough before the coffee.
Someone said there was an eye
in the sky that could see into all
the tomorrows but turns out it was
just vaporware, one more promise
better left unmet, I am torn between
the cautions of foregone days that
did not turn out so well and the desire
for every morning to be a fresh egg
cracked anew and sizzled in a skillet,
shall we have some toast today?
Maybe. Maybe not. Ask again later.
Magic 8 Ball
3 responses to “Magic 8 Ball”
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Genius. Ah, the imagery.Does PS, whose language skills are clearly impeccable and well-honed, use run-on sentences and hosts of consecutive commas in her poetry completely unaware of these grammatical errors, of the preferability and greater coherence offered by the period, or the semi-colon (or even, in a pinch parentheses)? My sources say no.
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long ago an instructor wrote on a paper of mine that they didn’t correct my sentence fragments and comma splices because they were “clearly a part of my style.” I was 13. Some things just persist. Like us, Dave. We persist.
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Sadly I never had a skilled English teacher. They knew their subject, but were only able to impart what they knew to those students who already knew it. It was only in my year of unschooling, when my peers took it upon themselves to teach me how to write at least passably well, that one of them, reading a painfully romantic story I’d written, commented that, while it was grammatically correct, my prose was so long-winded and dense, full of paragraph-length sentences replete with multiple sets of parentheses, it was a bit like a black hole, so massive and compacted that nothing could possibly escape from it, including meaning. As you can see, I’m still working on that.
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